Empowering businesses with the ability to improve decision-making by predicting future outcomes, SAP announces SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software.

The new offering aims to equip business users with a graphic tool for predictive modeling and advanced visualization. The software is intended to harness the value of big data, enabling organizations to reveal and act upon untapped opportunities and hidden risks.

"There is a lot of untapped insight that could be exposed from exploding internal and external, structured and unstructured data sources," says Dan Vesset, vice president, Business Analytics solutions, IDC. "Predictive capabilities help businesses explore and identify the opportunities and risks hiding in the sea of all that big data. SAP's integrated approach to predictive analytics helps more users learn not only what has happened, but also understand why it happened, what might happen, and what the best course of action is."

Predictive modeling has traditionally been the domain of statisticians and data scientists. However, SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is intended to bring predictive insight to an under-served user community—the business analyst. With the software, analysts can create models either by using the predictive algorithms included or can integrate and use algorithms from the R open-source data analysis and statistical language.

SAP plans to enable customers to use the software for instant insight into large data volumes to anticipate future opportunities and risks. Examples include:

• Understanding how historical sales, costs and other key metrics translate to future performance
• Seeing how predicted results compare with goals
• Revealing the causes of customer satisfaction and employee turnover
• Showing how past and emerging trends impact the bottom line
• Finding correlations in data for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
• Locating anomalies and clusters for targeted analysis

While SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is planned for availability via standalone deployment, the software is also intended to uniquely unlock the value in "Big Data" when utilized with the SAP HANA database, which provides a data mining and statistical function library.

Once data—structured, unstructured or both—is loaded into SAP HANA or an alternative data source, data and business analysts will be able to benefit from intuitive predictive modeling, beautiful advanced visualizations and data exploration, all with a drag-and-drop interface for data selection, preparation and processing.

Insights can then be delivered to dashboards, alerts and mobile devices, or accessed by other analytics solutions from SAP.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis and SAP HANA are important steps in SAP's goal of bringing predictive insight to everyone in the organization. This means extending predictive capabilities to where people work: into business applications, BI and collaboration environments, and on mobile devices.

SAP has already delivered predictive applications powered by SAP HANA to numerous industries, and is aggressively expanding its predictive applications portfolio.

 "Analytics solutions from SAP are powering a decision-making revolution for businesses that recognize the future starts a second from now, not a week or a year from now," said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. "That's why predictive applications must be intuitive, where people work and powered by real-time performance. With SAP's comprehensive approach to predictive analytics, more people in the business can explore, visualize and share insights from exploding volumes and varieties of data."